As a technology or ISV partner, chances are your customers are already using Red Hat Ansible for some kind of IT automation, and are looking for supported ways to expand, govern, or operationalize their Ansible automation. This often includes integrations with third-party products (such as yours).
The Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform provides a fully supported foundation for partners to build upon, and that is the focus of our blog today. In case you are new to Ansible, we will introduce and explain how Red Hat Partners can develop and certify for the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform to help your end customers.
The Ansible team describes IT automation as, what happens when one person meets a problem they never want to solve again. For your customers, Automation is the way to make their jobs and lives easier. It is a force multiplier, an opportunity to do more.
Teams are Automating
In customer organizations, automation often starts with one team and then grows. Teams including networking, security, developers and infrastructure operations. Customers start automating a single task, and then grow and scale that automation as they find more use cases. These customers are solving more problems--faster.
The nature of automation enables different parts of the IT organization to work together. Work from each team impacts the others, and vice versa. So organizations are standardizing on a single automation language -- and this is where Ansible fits. When automation crosses teams, customers need a platform to expand and govern this automation -- like the Ansible Automation Platform.
Why Ansible?
Ansible is a simple automation language that can perfectly describe an IT application infrastructure. We describe Ansible as: simple, powerful and agentless.
Simple: Because the Ansible language is human readable, no coding skills required -- which means it is easy to use by every team even without a coding background, accelerating adoption.
Powerful: Because Ansible is known for configuration management, but is powerful enough to unlock the orchestration of the lifecycle of the entire infrastructure and applications.
Agentless: Because Ansible uses standard connection protocols (like SSH, WinRM, etc.) and works across platforms in many domains such as Infrastructure, networks, clouds and security, simplifying the implementation in existing enterprise environments.
What can your end customers do with Ansible?
Ansible Automation has many use cases including configuration management, provisioning, application deployment, assisting with auditing and compliance, and much more. Ansible works on a variety of infrastructure including cloud, network, security, storage and much more. Example partner use cases:
- OS Configuration Management
- Virtual Infrastructures Management
- Continuous Integration and Delivery
- Configuration Consistency
- Operational State Management
- Compliance and Traceability
- Investigation Enrichment
- Threat Hunting
- Incident Response
- Multi-cloud Management
- Cloud Migration
- Private Cloud Integration
These examples highlight just a few ways Red Hat Partners are developing Ansible content. Red Hat offers the Ansible Certification Program, giving end customers support for Ansible content provided by Red Hat and the ISV Partner.
As a software company, are there ways to automate your solution to benefit your customer?
As a partner, Red Hat can advise you on best practices when developing Certified Ansible integrations.
To learn more about developing and certifying Ansible content for your product or service, please visit ansible.com/partners for more information
